00:00How many distance from Earth to Sun, Earth to other planets, Earth to moon, and Earth to nearest star?
00:07Distance from Earth to the Sun!
00:10Distance from Earth to other planets, all of them!
00:13Distance from Earth to the Moon!
00:16Distance from Earth to the nearest star!
00:19For thousands of years, humanity has looked up at the night sky and asked one question.
00:24How far? How far is the Sun?
00:27How far are the planets?
00:28How far is the Moon and the stars beyond?
00:33Today, we know the answers!
00:36And the answers are breathtaking.
00:39Let us begin with the star that sustains us.
00:43The Sun.
00:45Our world orbits this golden furnace at an average distance of 150 million kilometers.
00:52We call this one astronomical unit the cosmic yardstick by which we measure the solar system.
00:57One-hundred-and-fifty million kilometers!
01:01A distance so vast that light itself, the fastest thing in the universe, takes more than eight minutes to reach us.
01:10Every sunrise is old news!
01:12Photons born in the core of the Sun, traveling for thousands of years to reach its surface, and then another eight minutes to cross the void to your eyes.
01:22But the Sun is only the beginning.
01:24What about our neighbors, the planets?
01:26Closest of all is Mercury.
01:29From Earth, the distance to Mercury is never the same, sometimes as close as 77 million kilometers, sometimes as far as 222 million kilometers!
01:41A world of extremes, always dancing near the furnace.
01:45Next is Venus, the sister planet, so close in size to Earth, and yet so alien.
01:53The distance between us and Venus varies from 38 million kilometers at its nearest to more than 260 million kilometers at its farthest.
02:01A world wrapped in clouds of acid, glowing with heat, reminding us that similarity is not the same as safety.
02:08And then, of course, there is Mars, the red planet, the dream of colonization, the beacon of future explorers.
02:18From Earth to Mars, the gap shifts with the orbits, at best, 54 million kilometers.
02:27At worst, nearly 400 million kilometers!
02:33Imagine a journey that would take light just three minutes at its closest, and more than 20 at its farthest.
02:41Beyond Mars lies the great expanse of the asteroid belt, and then the giants!
02:46Jupiter, the Colossus, the king of planets.
02:50Distance from Earth? Between 590 million and 970 million kilometers!
02:56So far, that even at its closest, a radio signal takes half an hour to make the round trip.
03:02A world of storms so vast that they could swallow Earth whole.
03:06Beyond Jupiter, Saturn with its shimmering rings of ice, Earth to Saturn.
03:16From 1.2 billion kilometers to 1.7 billion kilometers.
03:21At this scale, numbers lose their meaning.
03:26Distances so huge, they blur into eternity.
03:29Farther still, Uranus tilted on its side, rolling like a cosmic barrel.
03:35It's distance! 2.62, 3.2 billion kilometers.
03:43And then, the edge of the classical planets.
03:47Neptune. Dark, stormy, far beyond the warmth of the sun.
03:52From Earth, Neptune lies 4.3 to 4.7 billion kilometers away.
03:58At that distance, light itself needs more than four hours to arrive.
04:02These are our planets, our companions in the solar system.
04:08But what of the moon, our faithful friend?
04:11The moon orbits Earth at an average of 384,000 kilometers.
04:17A distance so close by cosmic standards that we forget its immensity.
04:22Think of it. If Earth were the size of a basketball, the moon would be a tennis ball, hovering 7 meters away.
04:28And yet, that tiny gap is the gulf that Apollo crossed in 1969.
04:33Three days of travel.
04:34Half a million kilometers of emptiness to touch another world.
04:38But let us look further.
04:40Beyond planets.
04:41Beyond the moon.
04:43Beyond even the sun.
04:44The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri.
04:47Part of the Alpha Centauri system.
04:48It's distance.
04:514.24 light.
04:52Not millions of kilometers.
04:54Not billions.
04:56But 40 trillion kilometers.
05:00A number so large that our minds rebel.
05:03Even if you boarded the fastest spacecraft ever built by humans, the Parker Solar Probe,
05:09it would take you more than 7,000 years to reach that star.
05:13And that is the closest one.
05:16So when we ask how far, the answer is always farther than we can imagine.
05:23The sun, 150 million kilometers.
05:26The moon, 384,000 kilometers.
05:31The planets, millions to billions of kilometers.
05:35And the nearest star, 40 trillion kilometers away.
05:39The universe humbles us.
05:41It dwarfs our ambitions, shrinks our imaginations, reminds us that our home is small, but also precious.
05:49Because though the distances are vast, we are here.
05:54On one world, orbiting one star, measuring the void, daring to ask questions that stretch across eternity.
06:00And perhaps, one day, when our descendants look up at the night sky, those distances will not just be numbers.
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